How to Build a Capability Map for Business Growth |

“Know thyself.” In the modern business world, these words have become shorthand for an organization’s ability to be aware of itself, its people, and its potential.

For many businesses, building this self-awareness is easier said than done and requires a journey of self-discovery. Of course, on such a journey, it always helps to have a capability map.

A good business capability map gives you a clear picture of what will help you achieve your organization’s goals. Let’s understand how to build one!

What Is a Capability Map?

A visual capability map is a blueprint that illustrates your strengths and how they can work together. It highlights the essential skills, processes, and resources you possess to achieve your goals.

These maps break down the key areas essential to your growth. By clearly defining your capabilities, you can easily identify areas of strength and find opportunities for improvement.

👉🏼 Simply put, a capability map helps you see what you excel at and where to improve.

What is a business capability map?

For example, if you’re running an online retail business, some of your core capabilities might include stakeholder management, customer management, and online marketing. 

Each area represents a core capability supporting the business’s overall success. By mapping these capabilities, the company can see how different parts of the business connect, identify areas for improvement, and prioritize high-level resources to meet strategic goals. 

In short, a business capability map helps businesses see what they’re good at and where to improve their competitive advantage and achieve their desired goals.

Key elements of a business capability map

Building a business capability map doesn’t have to be complicated. A useful map should include the following five key components to minimize complexity:

1. Capabilities

Capabilities are the building blocks of any business. They define what an organization can do to achieve its strategic objectives. By clearly identifying them, businesses can ensure alignment across departments and focus on the core competencies required to drive value.

This clarity helps eliminate ambiguity and guides decision-making around resource allocation and operational priorities.

Identifying these strengths has allowed it to deliver a highly tailored user experience, setting it apart in the competitive music streaming market.

2. Capability grouping

Capabilities should be organized into logical groupings or hierarchies to easily understand how various functions and processes interrelate.

A high-priority capability like “Sales & Marketing” can be broken down into more specific sub-capabilities such as “Customer Acquisition” and “Market Research.” 

This hierarchical structure reduces complexity, offers a clear and organized view of the organization’s core functions, and helps identify interdependencies between different areas.

3. Performance indicators

Performance indicators accurately reflect the effectiveness of each capability, helping businesses understand where they stand and where improvements are needed.

These indicators can range from “Initial” (ad hoc or basic processes) to “Optimized” (well-defined and continually improving processes). 

These project management indicators help businesses prioritize enhancements, allocate human capital efficiently, and track progress over time.

4. Governance and ownership

Each capability should have clear governance and ownership, identifying the individuals or teams responsible for its execution and ongoing improvement.

This component ensures accountability and enables effective capacity management. By assigning ownership to the right people, correlate each capability with business objectives and that a specific person or group is responsible for its performance, maintenance, and optimization.

5. Interdependencies and relationships

A business capability map should highlight the relationships and interdependencies between different capabilities. Understanding how they influence or rely on one another helps identify gaps in critical areas that could cause bottlenecks or inefficiencies if not properly aligned.

Mapping these interdependencies allows organizations to prioritize actions and ensure that changes or improvements in one capability are coordinated across related functions, avoiding mishaps.

By understanding these key elements, you can create a comprehensive business capability map that provides valuable insights for organizational growth.

Examples of business capability maps

Business capability maps may vary by industry but serve the same purpose—to achieve organizational goals. 

Identifying core, enabling, and supporting capabilities, backed by process mapping, can help organizations drive industrial growth and success.

Benefits of Using Capability Maps

Business leaders widely recognize capability mapping as an important tool for strategic planning, operational efficiency, and transformation efforts. Here are some benefits:

1. Bridge organizational gaps

However, building capabilities requires first identifying gaps where organizations lack sufficient resources. A business capability map bridges these knowledge gaps, offering a clear view of how an organization functions and whether it’s following its business goals.

2. Communicate easily to stakeholders

A well-defined business capability map is a common language between departments, aligning everyone around shared goals. It helps avoid misunderstandings, reduces redundancy, and ensures that initiatives and investments are strategically sound.

3. Manage risks proactively

Capability mapping uncovers organizational weaknesses, potential risks, and critical interdependencies. By identifying these vulnerabilities, businesses can proactively mitigate risks before they become problems.

4. Achieve clarity on alignment with strategic goals

A business capability map provides clear visibility into how organizational capabilities align with strategic goals and objectives, ensuring better decision-making and resource allocation.

5. Make decisions strategically

When you map capabilities, decisions and processes become more strategic. IT investments can directly link to specific capabilities, for example, ensuring that each tech solution adds value.

Steps to Build a Business Capability Map

Creating a business capability map can be challenging. However, with the right tools and steps, it becomes less demanding. Here’s where an all-in-one productivity platform like comes into action.

With its intuitive features, such as customizable task views, powerful dashboards, seamless collaboration tools, AI, and automation, mapping your business capabilities and tracking key performance metrics becomes easy.

Let’s see how you can create a business capability map with .

1. Define key capabilities and domains

The first step is identifying the critical business capabilities you need to achieve organizational objectives. These essential skills, processes, and technologies enable your company to deliver products or services effectively. 

Break these capabilities into logical domains that group similar functions together, like marketing, operations, customer service, or IT.

Use the List View to create tasks for each capability and categorize them using Custom Fields (like domain or priority) to track and filter them easily.

Use concept map templates to simplify the process.

Using ’s Board View, you can also visually track the status of tasks required to build and strengthen each business capability. 

The board view allows you to organize tasks and capabilities visually into columns based on various criteria, such as status, assignee, or priority. Additionally, the drag-and-drop functionality helps to update task statuses easily and supports subgroups for more detailed organization. 

2. Align capabilities with business goals

Once you define the critical capabilities, you must ensure they match your goals. Understand what your company needs to achieve and map each capability to a strategic goal. This will help you prioritize capabilities that have the most significant impact on your business success.

By using Goals, you can track your progress against your strategic objectives.

Break down each goal into specific tasks or milestones for each capability. This helps ensure that all your efforts correspond with desired business outcomes.

To track the performance of tasks in service of these goals and capabilities, leverage Dashboards. They’ll help you pull data from your workspace to give you an overview of work progress.

You can visualize how well the capabilities support organizational goals and where adjustments may be needed.

3. Visualize relationships between capabilities

Visualizing the correlations between core capabilities helps identify dependencies, overlaps, and gaps. Whiteboards make visual collaboration intuitive, making the planning process collaborative and rapid.

Use a whiteboard to coordinate information-sharing about the mapping process in one place. Create dynamic and interactive maps with sticky notes, shapes, pens, and highlights to brainstorm and organize ideas visually. 

You can seamlessly connect your ideas to tasks, customize items, and even incorporate AI to enhance creativity and collaboration. Task relationships allow you to link related tasks across your workspace, making managing dependencies and highlighting important items easy.

You can also use Mind Maps for linking business capabilities. Use one or more mind maps to connect capabilities to overarching goals and keep everybody on the same page.

Used in conjunction, Whiteboards and Mind Maps make it easier to spot bottlenecks and areas that need more focus, share updates, and solicit feedback on changes quickly.

Jayson Ermac, Process Manager at Al Bees, highlights the usefulness of ’s offerings:

4. Monitor and track dependencies

Building a capability map requires attention to the dependencies between tasks. Track how capabilities depend on one another over time. Understand which capabilities are critical to your business architecture and ensure that changes in one area do not negatively affect others.

Use Task Dependencies to visualize and track which capabilities depend on others.

This feature helps identify critical paths and ensures that teams know the sequence in which they need to complete tasks. Further, Automations can streamline updates to capability tasks, notifying teams when you resolve a dependency or reach a milestone. Automate processes based on specific events like task creation or status changes with custom triggers and actions.

5. Collaborate and get team input

Collaboration is the key to ensuring a comprehensive and accurate capability map. To improve collaboration, team members can provide input and feedback through Comments on tasks.

You can @mention team members to ask questions or provide updates directly. This ensures seamless communication during the mapping process.

6. Document capability definitions and insights

As you define and refine capabilities, it’s crucial to document the definitions, scope, and any relevant insights or guidelines. Docs are an excellent tool for creating detailed documentation for each capability, ensuring team consistency and clarity.

Features like real-time collaboration, custom templates, and task integration empower teams to align resources, track progress, and ensure all capabilities are mapped effectively.

You can create dedicated sections for each strategic goal, list out the corresponding capabilities, and include detailed descriptions, owners, timelines, and performance metrics. This ensures everyone has access to the most up-to-date information.

7. Track team skills

Knowing an individual’s ability in a team switch makes it easier to assign them to work that matches their skills. The Capability Matrix Template is a simple way to see who on your team can do what. 

The template helps you track, manage, and visualize your team’s skills. With this Whiteboard template, you can:

• Track the progress of each team member’s skill improvements with Custom Statuses
• Easily visualize the capabilities of your team via attributes to help you manage their skills better
• Get a quick bird’s-eye view of your team’s skills with the Capability Matrix view
• Monitor improvements in team skills with additional features like tagging, nested subtasks, and priority labels

This business capability map template helps you choose the right people for the right jobs, making your team more efficient and productive. It’s essential to ensure everyone is on the same page regarding individual and team goals and the capabilities that can help achieve them.

8. Review and update the capability map periodically

As business needs evolve, so should your capability map. Regular reviews and updates to the existing ones are necessary to ensure the map stays relevant.

With the right automations in place, stakeholders can be notified of upcoming reviews or changes to existing capabilities.

Notifications can alert team members when you update dependencies or add new tasks. This creates a continuous feedback loop that helps refine and maintain the real-time map.

Thus, leveraging ’s powerful suite of features lets you easily create a dynamic, collaborative, and actionable map.

Practical Uses of Business Capability Maps

So, capability maps offer multiple benefits, and tools like let you generate them relatively easily. But how exactly do you use one in your business?

Let’s look at some suggestions to put these maps to good use:

Support decision-making 

When organizations consider new market trends, a business capability map provides insight into existing strengths and weaknesses. It helps leadership teams determine where the organization needs to invest or evolve to execute the business strategy more effectively.

Plan technology upgrades 

Mapping capabilities against current technological platforms helps the organization understand where to implement new technologies, such as top automation tools or AI, to enhance business processes and functions.

Improve and innovate continuously

Capability maps are a reference point for tracking improvements in processes and technologies, ensuring businesses stay agile and competitive.

Support new product launches

Capability maps help identify which business areas, from R&D to distribution, are ready to support new technology or products.

Apart from these, other ways exist to utilize these maps for organizational needs. Once you know and understand your business’s capabilities clearly, there is no shortage of applications for that knowledge.

Business Capability Mapping Challenges

While business capability maps clearly show an organization’s abilities, they have challenges. Let’s look at some of these challenges and how can help overcome them:

Complexity in mapping and visualizing capabilities

Visualizing capability maps can become overwhelming, especially in large organizations where capabilities span across different departments, functions, and geographies. Additionally, updating the map over time can be a significant challenge.

Fragmented data across tools

Organizations often use multiple tools like spreadsheet software, project management systems, and ERP systems. This fragmentation can make data tracking difficult.

Collaboration challenges across teams

Business capability maps often require input from different departments. A lack of inter-departmental coordination can thus challenge the mapping process.

No matter what challenge you face with capability mapping, offers an easy-to-use solution. So, there’s no excuse not to build your own map today with !

Best Practices for Building and Maintaining Capability Maps

Now that you’re convinced about the usefulness of capability maps, know how to make them, and have a solution to any challenges and objections you might face, there are a couple of best practices for building and maintaining them:

1. Define clear objectives and scope

Establish clear objectives before building a capability map. Define the scope, whether company-wide or specific to certain functions, to keep the map focused and relevant.

For additional impact, consider linking the scope of your mapping to organizational and project management KPIs for all concerned stakeholders.

2. Engage stakeholders early and often

Involve cross-functional teams and key stakeholders early to view capabilities comprehensively and prevent future misalignments. Remember to use collaboration tools like to make this super easy!

3. Use a standardized capability framework

Adopt industry-standard frameworks to create a structured approach for defining and organizing capabilities. Incorporating workflow management practices can make the process even better.

Follow these recommendations and have a business capability map to advance your organization.

Bring Your Capability Map to Life Using

A well-crafted business capability map provides a high-level view of an organization’s capabilities and serves as the blueprint for success.

Identifying, organizing, and continuously refining capabilities ensures that every part of your business works toward the same vision.

With , you can seamlessly build, update, and manage your maps in one integrated platform. From real-time collaboration and visual tools to powerful automation and performance management, ensures that your maps match business objectives and are adaptable to changes. 

Ready to maximize your business’s success? Sign up for a free account and get started today!

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